What a kerfuffle about the mad Trump saying he would like to see a united Ireland! On the first day of his private, golf-watching visit to Ireland earlier this month he said it would be a “fantastic thing”, a “great thing”, a “very cool thing”and “it would seem to me one of the naturals of all time” to put Northern Ireland and Ireland together.

Actually, I agree with all of these things. But I also agree with the Minister for Foreign Affairs, Helen McEntee, when she reacted: “Something of this magnitude can only happen where there’s consent from the Irish people.” And from the people of Northern Ireland in particular.

Unsurprisingly, Trump seemed to revel in the controversy he had caused by his comments (“I love my comments”, he said). Irish Times reporter Jack Horgan-Jones called them “empty and unserious”. That paper’s former political editor, Stephen Collins, warning about Trump’s capacity to create confusion and mayhem, said his support for a united Ireland was “probably about as serious as his ambition to take over Canada.”¹ And, only half-facetiously, doesn’t the word “fantastic” also have a rather different meaning than “very good”?

That didn’t stop commentators in the Republic unleashing a torrent of unthinking pro-Border poll comment about how significant this all was for an eventual referendum (silly stuff like former Bertie Ahern adviser Gerard Howlin writing that Trump’s comments will “ricochet throughout history”²). It didn’t matter that British prime minister Andy Burnham, who will surely have the final word about a Border poll (rather than his Northern Ireland Secretary, as per a strict reading of the Good Friday Agreement), had said a couple of weeks earlier that a Border poll was “off the table”.

After a meeting with Burnham in Manchester last week, Taoiseach Micheál Martin said the Border poll issue had been left “deliberately vague” in the Good Friday Agreement and he believed that the British government was “not in position” to move forward on such a poll.³

All this nationalist hype sends me back to the careful wording of the documents, agreed by the two governments, which laid the foundations for peace in Northern Ireland, the 1998 Good Friday Agreement and the 1995 Joint Framework Document. The third principle on the opening page of the former states: “We are committed to partnership, equality and mutual respect within Northern Ireland, between North and South, and between these islands.” The fifth principle recognises “our continuing and equally legitimate, political aspirations.”

That means equal legitimacy for unionism and nationalism. For all Sinn Fein and Ireland’s Future’s exclusive and obsessional focus on driving on to unity through a Border poll, those two underlying principles are more important than the one clause on such a poll in a 35 page international agreement. And for the foreseeable future, until there is some major demographic and political change, that will remain so.

On a Border poll, the Agreement states: “The Secretary of State shall exercise the power under paragraph 1 [to direct the holding of a Border poll] if at any time it appears likely to him that a majority of those voting would express a wish that Northern Ireland should cease to be part of the United Kingdom and form part of a united Ireland.” This is a bit vague: will he/she base his/her decision on election results or opinion polls or other factors? But whether we like it or not, this is what is written in a mould-breaking agreement that the great majority of people believe, for all its faults, has brought peace and some measure of stability to Northern Ireland.

And whether in terms of election results or opinion polls, the number of people voting for nationalist parties or expressing themselves in favour of unity in opinion polls has rarely gone beyond 40%. 40 Northern Ireland opinion polls since 1998 listed by Wikipedia show minorities of between 17% and 46% in favour of unity, with the most recent poll – from Liverpool University’s Institute of Irish Studies and the Sunday Times in May this year – most representative at 35.8%.

I might also point to a line in the Joint Framework Document agreed between the two governments in 1995, which laid many of the foundations for the Good Friday Agreement. This stated: “Both Governments accept that agreement on an overall settlement requires, inter alia, a balanced accommodation [my emphasis] of the differing views of the two main traditions on the constitutional issues in relation to the special position of Northern Ireland.” That was the genius of the Good Friday Agreement: to the astonishment of the watching world, it was accepted as a balanced accommodation by all sides.

Why am I quoting these statements? Because it seems to me that these sentiments, which are at the heart of the Good Friday Agreement, are largely missing from the unity debate. If a “balanced accommodation” on the contested constitutional question between two “equally legitimate political aspirations” is the essence of the Agreement, my question is “Where are the champions of that balanced accommodation today?” Sadly, it seems to me, they are few and far between. Instead, both sides seem to have gone back, to use former SDLP leader Mark Durkan’s phrase, to their traditional, unyielding “factory settings” on the constitutional issue. Or maybe they have changed places: there is now deep contempt for unionists on the nationalist side and deep suspicion of nationalists on the unionist side.

The onward drive towards an unthinking, unexamined unity referendum is also a problem for the Republic. Because much as people here hate it to be said, we in the South also have our own problem of sectarianism. Last year’s defeated presidential candidate Heather Humphreys, a Monaghan Presbyterian, put it succinctly in her address to the Thomas D’Arcy McGee summer school in Carlingford last month.

She asked the fundamental question: ‘How can a new Ireland deepen its core values while genuinely accommodating Northern unionists?” Emphasising the equal importance of welcoming and integrating new migrants, she said “true integration means we cannot expect Northern unionists, or new migrant communities, to simply blend into an existing, unchanged nationalist framework.”

She recalled that during her presidential campaign she had seen her identity weaponised by a minority, with her and her family subjected to “toxic, targeted sectarian abuse. We saw malicious online smears, videos generating tens of thousands of views, and false assertions designed to paint my tradition as inherently un-Irish or incompatible with modern civic life.

“My family have been in this country for hundreds of years, longer than the United States of America has existed, and yet I was depicted as a lesser Irish person because of my cultural background and religion.

She asked: “Is there a hierarchy of Irishness? If someone is not fluent in the Irish language, or comes from a particular faith tradition or cultural background, does that make them any less Irish? Like many of you, I truly believed our country had moved past that kind of tribal prejudice. It sent a deeply troubling signal to Protestant, unionist and loyalist communities across this island. It forced them to look at the Republic and ask themselves: Is there truly a place for us here, or is the ‘new Ireland’ simply riddled with the prejudices of the old?

“So, how do we respond to this ugly modern strain of sectarianism? Sectarianism does not disappear simply because we look the other way or pretend it is confined to the history books or to a different jurisdiction. When a candidate’s faith or heritage is used as a tool to discredit them and disqualify them from public affection, every democrat, across every political party, must call it out immediately and without qualification.”

She said “we must refuse to run away from our complex histories. Instead, we must deepen education and understanding. It was heartening to see the participation of bands from the Ulster Scots and unionist tradition in the recent Fleadh Cheol na Éireann in Belfast, which was universally lauded as a fantastic success.”

She noted that “Ulster Scots bands have long performed at both the annual picnic in my home village of Drum and the local St Patrick’s Day Parade in Cootehill. Yet there were sections of the Irish media who sought to portray them as something sinister during last year’s campaign.” There was “little or no understanding” of this outside the border counties.

She warned that “if a person from the Ulster Scots tradition running for the Presidency is publicly subjected to blatant sectarian abuse, then we will struggle to convince unionists in Ulster that their identity will be respected and protected in a shared future.”

She quoted the words of the then Taoiseach Jack Lynch when he addressed Ulster Unionists in July 1970, as nearly 30 years of violence in the North was just beginning:

“There is no real invader here.We are all Irish in all our different kinds of ways. Let us not appeal to past gods as if past generations had said the last word about Ireland. We have the opportunity to say for our generation what’s in our hearts and minds.I think that there is in us an instinct for good, for enjoyment, for beauty and above all for peace with our neighbours.

“We have had invasion piled upon invasion. Danes, Normans, English, Scots followed into Ireland our earlier migrations and became part of our soil, of our blood and bones, of the green fields we cultivate.Yours was our latest migration.Do you mistrust yourselves so much as to refuse to see that your home is here – not across any waters? 

“Since the Irish state was founded fifty years my predecessors and I have said again and again that we have no wish to confront you or destroy you. Indeed, we think that a branch has been broken from the Irish tree.”

Humphreys concluded by saying that Thomas D’Arcy McGee [who went from being a Young Irelander to one of the founders of the Canadian Confederation and was assassinated by a Fenian] understood that “mature nations are not built by demanding sameness, but by creating a civic home spacious enough for difference.That is the Ireland we must continue to build: confident in its culture, honest about its history, generous in its belonging, and brave enough to make room for every tradition on this island.”

PS This is a landmark blog for me. 20 years ago this month, as director of the Centre for Cross Border Studies, I wrote my first blog – ‘A Note from the Next Door Neighbours’ – arguing that greatly increased cross-border contact was one of the best ways towards peaceful change in Ireland. Was that a more optimistic time for Ireland, Europe and the world? Undoubtedly. But I still live in hope: hope as defined by Seamus Heaney quoting Vaclav Havel. “Hope is a state of the soul rather than a response to the evidence. It is not the expectation that things will turn out successfully but the conviction that something is worth working for, however it turns out. Its deepest roots are in the transcendental, beyond the horizon”.

¹ ‘Trump is not so much interested in Ireland as in wreaking havoc’, Irish Times, 18 September

² ‘Trump’s unity comment could be a turning point’, Irish Times, 15 September

³ ‘Britain ‘not in position’ to move on Border poll, Irish Times, 19 September